THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 19, 1994 TAG: 9410190437
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Have you noticed an alarming trend? Chocolate soda pop is disappearing from grocery shelves and convenience stores.
Crowding it out of existence are all kinds of pastelly, upscale fruit-flavored drinks in bottles.
And, so help me, plain ol' water is being sold in soda-sized bottles.
Once I had a Coca-Cola franchise in northeast Atlanta, back in 1931, a wooden, bright-yellow drink stand that my partner and I put together under a shade tree on Hardendorf Avenue.
Hot, thirsty home-coming fathers would stop for a Coke. For a nickel.
Had we but the wit to hold on to that franchise, no telling what it would be worth today; but fast as the truck delivered the yellow crates of rattling, shimmering soft drinks on a sweltering summer afternoon, we drank up the profits.
Had anybody told us that 60 or so years later people would be buying water, no better than any drawn from a faucet, in soft drink bottles, we would have said the seer had a sunstroke.
We would have offered the sun-struck one, for free, a Nehi grape or Red Rock orange from the ice-filled galvanized tin washtub under the counter.
Water in bottles! Why, we used to go into the Big Woods and, crouching, drink water straight out of the creek, including, on one occasion, a tadpole.
Which, I am happy to report, did not reach froghood.
Has our society become so effete that it must have water out of a bottle? I fear for us.
As is well-known, Rome began to decline and fall when the Tenth Legion took to drinking water out of bottles instead of cupped hands.
Well, let the cognoscenti drink water from bottles so long as the chocolate-flavored soda pop has a place on convenience-store shelves.
There is nothing tony about that chocolate drink - no strange addictive substance of any sort. It is, basically, nothing more than water and chocolate flavoring.
In appearance it is not particularly alluring. It looks like the mud and water we used to mix as children when we were playing drugstore.
You find no chocoholic here, but something about that drink appeals to some of us. Maybe because it is simply thirst-quenching. Nor does it lie heavily on the stomach.
Boring through the night in the old convertible, I sight the neon light of the convenience store and pull in for a chocolate pop. Only to find none is on hand.
A clerk in North Carolina theorized not long ago that the big beverage manufacturers no longer bottled chocolate drinks and stores declined to stock soda pop from smaller bottling firms.
Maybe, like the chocolate pop, I am part of a vanishing breed of consumer. Maybe I am the only one left consuming that simple, unassuming beverage.
It could be. by CNB